Exposing the lie of runaway health costs.

Health spending in Alberta is down since 1990 as measured by the objective standard of percentage of GDP. Measuring it as a percentage of the provincial budget is entirely subjective and inherently open to partisan manipulation and interpretation.

To wit: If your ideology demands the ongoing deliberate impoverishment of the public purse, of the massive transfer of public wealth into private hands and the denigration of the very concept of a public sector then you must continue to wail about an entirely deliberate and artificial 'crisis' in public healthcare while doing everything possible to make it look bad enough to manufacture enough consent to gut it.

“This is the government that has saved almost none of the boom-time surpluses, has foregone $8 billion to $15 billion in tax revenue per year and has given away billions more in royalty breaks,” says Gibson. “The problem is not that health care is unaffordable, but rather that the government has chosen to be irresponsible with revenue collection and savings.”

“The public health care system has yet to fully recover from the 21% in cuts inflicted upon it between 1994 and 1996, and now the government wants to start cutting again,” points out researcher Greg Flanagan, author of the September 2008 report Sustainable Healthcare for Seniors from which much of the information in the fact sheets and backgrounder is drawn.

Gibson says that the Institute has chosen to release the backgrounder and accompanying fact sheets to ensure that Albertans have the information they need in order to fully assess the cuts to health care that will be announced next week. “Albertans need to know that this is not about affordability; this is about political choices guided by ideology, and it’s about irresponsible fiscal management.